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As of now, I can't log in, either. So there's no way to save your work.

And, there are no options to make the thing pick the roads you want to drive on ... would be nice to be able to tell it "I want to take road x on the way there". I suppose we can inject more destinations in order to force the issue.

c) .tar.gz makes you wonder... is iDrive running some flavor of Unix? (VxWorks/Linux/BSD?) Interesting! If it does, the GPL license should be included in your BMW papers... That leaves a multitude possibilities.

[d]

The present generation iDrive uses QNX. (I know this because of an intersection between what I do for work and what I do for play, but this is common (Googled) knowledge). The GPL may become more relevant for the next generation of equipment. Plenty to thrash with around the topic of GPL and the distinctions between user-space and kernel-mode. Remember though that the iDrive could/can have access to parts of the car you would not want amateurs intoxicated by source code playing in. If BMW fail to navigate the GPL correctly it may be simpler for them to just walk away from all those features we want.

My own preference would be to have a SDK for creating applications running in a para-virtualized environment within iDrive, all safely isolated from safety-critical or liability treacherous areas of the core system but with access to 'safe' (read-only?) environmental devices or meters in /dev. E.g. /dev/speed, /dev/audio/chan. Not /dev/throttle.

I would imagine that there is little prospect of that happening given the typical demographic for BMW, the technical challenges and validation of such an environment, and the forseable economic climate.

And, there are no options to make the thing pick the roads you want to drive on ... would be nice to be able to tell it "I want to take road x on the way there". I suppose we can inject more destinations in order to force the issue.

As with Google Maps' directions you can 'grab' the wiggly blue route line and drag it to where you want to go. As you hover over the route a small white dot - the grab handle - appears. Just pull it to the road or place you need to pass or visit. The route automagically recalculates and the grab handle becomes another waypoint. A grab handle is available on any limb between waypoints so you can continue to refine or futz with the route ad nauseum.

I still do not know what is the story with that pesky .png file - strange, i can't view it in any way... under any of the OSes I have available. But, that is negligible. What I am interested in is if you would be willing to test a manually crafted .xml (either by me, or I am confident you would have no problem editing the file) with the car. Unfortunately until ~ 6/1 I will be BMW-less...

I still do not know what is the story with that pesky .png file - strange, i can't view it in any way... under any of the OSes I have available. But, that is negligible. What I am interested in is if you would be willing to test a manually crafted .xml (either by me, or I am confident you would have no problem editing the file) with the car. Unfortunately until ~ 6/1 I will be BMW-less...

At home I will try to create some simple .xml parser...

I am worse off than you. I don't get my ED until June 2nd. The only access to a suitable BMW is at the local dealer, and I fell out with the closest dealer (2 miles) when they refused to negotiate from published ED pricing. I went to a dealer 20+ miles away to save thousands. I now don't expect to go there until T-14 days or so when I do the final papers (mostly federal government issued green papers). My PO and other early docs are being mailed today instead of my driving there.

I had a play with the png earlier. No luck with me either (Fedora 9). I had guessed it was a graphic assigned to the route but it doesn't conform to a regular PNG. Nor can I identify it by inspection or using Trid.

I'll do it. Need to head in to the dealer next week for financing probably.

Or, I'll head down there this weekend. They are excited ... I've promised to train them on the use of the Nav system once we've got it all figured out. So far, I've written a white paper for them on the "smartphone integration" and now educated them about BMW-Routes, which they apparently haven't been told about.

Maybe I should be asking for commissions

Now, I've been doing some toying when I can. I've got routes created by viaMichelin and downloaded for Garmin and TomTom. Then created the same 3 waypoints using Routes.

The TomTom file is binary ... not messing with that for now.

The Garmin file is straight XML ... there's now some potential for creating a conversion for any utility that can create Garmin output files for use in the car

However, the Routes file is very detailed. The Garmin file is basically the Lat/Long of the waypoints, clearly then relying on the machine it's imported into to map the actual route directions. The Routes file includes a ton of waypoints describing the route, not just the destinations. The real question will be "if I revise the xml tags of the Garmin output file, will the car take it?" If it does, I can whip together a python or perl converter pretty quickly.

Any preferences? Guess I could also fiddle with the utilities to make the python a stand-alone exe ... or put it onto a website ... maybe that makes the most sense so that I (we) can control and modify the source code.

I wonder how long before ViaMichelin provides a BMW output format directly???

However, the Routes file is very detailed. The Garmin file is basically the Lat/Long of the waypoints, clearly then relying on the machine it's imported into to map the actual route directions. The Routes file includes a ton of waypoints describing the route, not just the destinations.

It was easy to ceate a schema from the original XML file. It would have been much easier if I could find where the original schema is stored on the BMW site. The XML file has jaxb in it, so the application is written in JAVA with an XML interface.

The start and destination have always. I would guess that the more detailed information in the start and destination are in the same format that you would use to manually search for a location.

The waypoints have optional. The waypoints are sequentially numbered 6 and just have the Latitude and Longitude.

I would not be surprised if you could just use the start and end destinations and skip the waypoints.

I am planning to work on a parser that will take a Google Maps "link" and parse it into route form.

Should have it knocked out by this weekend.

This way, we can "save" our work since the link contains all of your waypoints. This will not be as complete as the BMW system with pretty icons, etc, unless I figure out something after the basic system is working.

Learn how to create and download the resulting file to users machine -- open

Three issues now

Mockups were tested by a Fester and they did not import

Attempt to parse route of die Alpenstraße resulted in a waypoint of "unknown road"

My trip starts Monday

So, back to the drawing board, so to speak. This is tough since I don't have a car to experiment with.

The "unknown road" bug came as a total surprise and means I'll have to learn how to reverse geocode the hex-coded string that Google must be using. There is a ton of info on Google's site on this. Maybe I'll get tired of driving my car in the Alps and work on this during the trip

If the reverse-geocode via php isn't proving a quick path, I'll probably switch to massaging the Garmin output from viaMichelin created routes and see if I can make that work.

In the meantime, if anyone has spare time and wants to find code that will let you take the gmaps geocode string and turn it into a PHP array ...

Ok- I'm new to this forum, so please forgive me if this question was already answered. I did poke around for a couple of days first though.

How does one upload the route to the nav system? I plug in the USB drive, but I can't figure out how to get the route to the nav system. I can brows the USB drive via the audio system and I can see the directories where the route is stored, but I can't figure out how to transfer that route to the nav system.

Ok- I'm new to this forum, so please forgive me if this question was already answered. I did poke around for a couple of days first though.

How does one upload the route to the nav system? I plug in the USB drive, but I can't figure out how to get the route to the nav system. I can brows the USB drive via the audio system and I can see the directories where the route is stored, but I can't figure out how to transfer that route to the nav system.

I have an 09 135i and am in USA.

TIA

It is extremely counter-intuitive. I am presently on my ED trip near Salzburg and it has been nothing but a royal pain in the butt every time I use it. A huge disappointment over the pre-trip hopes I had. So far I have been trying to import routes for Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. None, except the first day route to/from Neuschwanstein has imported, and that required some off-manual incantation from a Welt guru which was interesting from an easter-egg perspective but does nothing now that I am on my own. The rest have just hung. OK - it did warn me that the former eastern bloc countries were outside the bmw-routes planning area but since the website generated files and the nav system had maps I figured 'why not?'. Stalling the nav system is a no-no in anyone's book.

Now I am in Austria I find the import of a simple Vienna - Salzburg route would not import either. I have tried just about every combo of files and structures including the BMWNav folder that worked with the Neuschwanstein one. No dice.

I am beginning to suspect that it is something to do with my nav maps. The version supplied on my system includes the word 'Test' and is from 2008. I already know from my time 'on the ground' that they are incomplete and desperately out of date. On the two occasions I have been diverted on a detour (while in Germany) the nav system has me driving across open fields even though my wheels and eyes tell me I am driving on a nice bit of 6-lane road which is clearly several years old at least.

I'm presently in Annaberg (south of Salzburg) and my apartment is again in fresh space even though the road and apartment are at least 10 years old and significantly sized.

Another whine: addresses with multiple possibilities (roads which occur several times, towns ditto) are all listed, but the discriminator 'zip code', postleitzahl if I remember correctly, are scolled off to the right so to find the correct one one must try each in turn, re-'typing' it each time. Grrrr!

Apart from that everything and particularly the car is just spectacular.

It is extremely counter-intuitive. I am presently on my ED trip near Salzburg and it has been nothing but a royal pain in the butt every time I use it. A huge disappointment over the pre-trip hopes I had. So far I have been trying to import routes for Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. None, except the first day route to/from Neuschwanstein has imported, and that required some off-manual incantation from a Welt guru which was interesting from an easter-egg perspective but does nothing now that I am on my own. The rest have just hung. OK - it did warn me that the former eastern bloc countries were outside the bmw-routes planning area but since the website generated files and the nav system had maps I figured 'why not?'. Stalling the nav system is a no-no in anyone's book.

Now I am in Austria I find the import of a simple Vienna - Salzburg route would not import either. I have tried just about every combo of files and structures including the BMWNav folder that worked with the Neuschwanstein one. No dice.

I am beginning to suspect that it is something to do with my nav maps. The version supplied on my system includes the word 'Test' and is from 2008. I already know from my time 'on the ground' that they are incomplete and desperately out of date. On the two occasions I have been diverted on a detour (while in Germany) the nav system has me driving across open fields even though my wheels and eyes tell me I am driving on a nice bit of 6-lane road which is clearly several years old at least.

I'm presently in Annaberg (south of Salzburg) and my apartment is again in fresh space even though the road and apartment are at least 10 years old and significantly sized.

Another whine: addresses with multiple possibilities (roads which occur several times, towns ditto) are all listed, but the discriminator 'zip code', postleitzahl if I remember correctly, are scolled off to the right so to find the correct one one must try each in turn, re-'typing' it each time. Grrrr!

Apart from that everything and particularly the car is just spectacular.

Frank

thanks for the quick reply Frank. I took a look at your map- wow! nice trip! maybe I should have done an ED too... oh well.

But, uh.. you started to write the procedure, but you kinda got side tracked by the frustration you've been having... do you remember the easter-egg incantation of the Welt guru? Is it something you can share or were you sworn to secrecy?

thanks for the quick reply Frank. I took a look at your map- wow! nice trip! maybe I should have done an ED too... oh well.

But, uh.. you started to write the procedure, but you kinda got side tracked by the frustration you've been having... do you remember the easter-egg incantation of the Welt guru? Is it something you can share or were you sworn to secrecy?

Thanks again.
-yce

I'm going on memory since my 535i is still on a ship, but here goes.

You have to create your route on www.bmw-routes.com and download it to your computer. This will create a zip file which needs to be extracted. Once extracted, you should see a directory structure like BMWData/Nav/.tar.gz. Copy the whole directory structure to a USB memory stick.

In the car:
Insert the memory stick into the USB port in the glove compartment, not the center console. I made that mistake a couple to times. The center console does not work for trip imports.
Select Nav
You need to find the "trip with multiple destinations" and select it
You then will need to find the trip list option.
There is a trick somewhere in this process where the only way to find the correct option to select is by hitting the "option" button, but I can't remember where exactly in the process that in required.
You should then see "Import from USB". Once selected and you may have to hit OK and then your route should be downloaded.
You may have to go back to trip list and select the imported trip.
You should then see all of your destinations show up.

Good luck.

You could also try searching bimmerfest for "bmw-routes". There is also some info on the ED Wiki under Counting down and Preparing for pick-up. It hasn't been updated in a while. Hopefully someone will update it soon. If not, I'll update late July or early August when I get my car back.

Wolfgang0524 basically has the in-car routine down. I didn't find it that complicated if I just followed the instructions on the BMW Routes website. More problematic was getting the route I created from the website to my USB and on to the car. For Frank AZ, one thing to keep in mind, you can only have one trip on the USB at a time or it confuses the system and it won't download any of the routes.

Anyway, after creating and naming a route on the website, click on "Transfer Route to Vehicle" and do the following:

1. On the page that comes up next, click on "Saving the route to USB memory stick" on the bottom right of that page.

2. On the next page that comes up, click on "Route herunterladen" (in the middle of the page). That will send the route to your computer's desktop. You will see a zip file with your route's name.

3. Move the file to your USB (right click on the file and use "Move to" to send it to the USB).

4. Once on the USB, extract the file there (right click on the file and click on "Extract Here").

You should now have a folder on your USB named "BMW Data". That folder will have in it a folder named "Nav" and in that folder will be the routes file with the extensions .tar.gz. Don't do anything with all of that, just leave it all in the BMW Data folder. Put your USB in the car (glove box USB, not 6FL) and follow the directions on the website to download into your vehicle (basically the directions Wolfgang0524 gave above).

One more important step, put the USB in the glovebox slot before starting the car, then turn on the ignition.

I have been using the USB import function here in Europe for a couple of months (US-spec car) since BMW does not have a way to activate the US telematics systems in Europe.

By and large I found the USB trips works well. As I noted in another thread, you can't have more than one trip in the same directory. When I travel, if I don't want to bring multiple USB sticks, I have a small adapter for the Micro SD card for my Blackberry and I save the trips on the microSD card before I leave. As I need a new trip, I use a file utility to move the new trip into the directory and load it from the microSD card. Has worked fine.

One major caveat is with setting up your waypoints manually (by dragging the route around). Drill down to the highest level of magnification to make sure you are placing your waypoint where you want to go...because otherwise you will find it taking you to some odd places.

Also, when you miss a waypoint, it is best to manually select the go on to the next waypoint option on the navigation system. Although the nav is usually able to figure out that you are doing that, it sometimes doesn't and send you through a tortured trip back to the same point. Helps to keep an eye on the big picture map too.

Wolfgang0524 basically has the in-car routine down. I didn't find it that complicated if I just followed the instructions on the BMW Routes website. More problematic was getting the route I created from the website to my USB and on to the car. For Frank AZ, one thing to keep in mind, you can only have one trip on the USB at a time or it confuses the system and it won't download any of the routes.

Anyway, after creating and naming a route on the website, click on "Transfer Route to Vehicle" and do the following:

1. On the page that comes up next, click on "Saving the route to USB memory stick" on the bottom right of that page.

2. On the next page that comes up, click on "Route herunterladen" (in the middle of the page). That will send the route to your computer's desktop. You will see a zip file with your route's name.

3. Move the file to your USB (right click on the file and use "Move to" to send it to the USB).

4. Once on the USB, extract the file there (right click on the file and click on "Extract Here").

You should now have a folder on your USB named "BMW Data". That folder will have in it a folder named "Nav" and in that folder will be the routes file with the extensions .tar.gz. Don't do anything with all of that, just leave it all in the BMW Data folder. Put your USB in the car (glove box USB, not 6FL) and follow the directions on the website to download into your vehicle (basically the directions Wolfgang0524 gave above).

One more important step, put the USB in the glovebox slot before starting the car, then turn on the ignition.

Good luck.

OK. I tried Wolfgang0524's procedure, but ran into a few hurdles.
1- I don't seem to have a USB port in my glove box. Am I just missing it?! I have a 135i, btw.
2- When in NAV I do not have a "trip w/multi destination" option. I'm wondering if the USB key has to be plugged in before you get that option.

Maybe my firmware is out of date? I'll check the version and post that later.

If you have NAV you have the USB in the glove box, but it is hard to find. While sitting in the driver's seat, open the glove box. Then, put your head into the foot well of the passenger seat. (No, I'm not joking or being crude.) The USB slot is up high in the glove box. Once you find it and get the feel of it, it is not big deal to put the USB in. By the way, that is the same slot you can use to upload music files to your car if you do not have the 6FL option.

Put the USB in, start the car, an then wait a minute. I find that sometimes if I go to NAV too soon, the USB does not show up.

As far as trip with multiple destinations goes, that should be there. That is not just used for importing trips, but also for creating multiple destination trips from within the vehicle.

Thanks to all those that have submitted tips and suggestions. Along the way I have tried all of those. Starting with the simple Windows drag-drop method to place the BMW Data folder on my USB, all the way to using WinZip, and then in increasing frustration assorted Linux things on a Linux partition I brought out with me. Basically zilch. Car on; car off; car toggling; curse word incantaions.

Going back to absolute basics and turning off everything I presume and following BMW's directions precisely.... still zilch. I am very much of the opinion that my car has a problem of some sort in the nav department. Even at the Welt when I tried to install the simple in-Germany trip to Neuschwanstein it wouldn't work as advertised nor as gclabbe and others experienced. It took a visit of an iDrive guru to the turntable and something he did with the USB port in the glove compartment before anything happened and without whatever gadget he used I cannot reproduce that success.

I would have thought the system software, the language pack and the maps would be independant but perhaps they do interact in bad ways. I am concerned about my maps because my 'Test' denominated maps have blank spaces. Most recently yesterday, on the approach to Venice on an ancient autostrada, suddenly we dropped off the edge of the world and were driving across grey-space and had to navigate by the sun and (gasp) printed maps to find Mestre, when normal service was resumed.

Since no one else has commented I am also presuming some GPS issues unique to my car too since when I was in the south Tyrol Alps my track was parallel to a road and not on the road so 'Gretel' (my nav voice) was perpetually enticing me to turn left or right to join the track she wanted. I would guess this might have something to do with loss of precision because some satellites were obscured by great chunks of Austria, but even so any other GPS I have used has been able to track up to 12 satellites were they in view and not barf if half the sky is covered. With a constellation of 24 -26 sats I shouldn't be down to only 3 sats with less than half the sky obscured, at least according to my GPS knowledge. Good luck to the military if that is the case, anyway.

Intermittent altitude information also indicates to me a loss of satellite triangulation, which also manifests on other GPS as a horizontal displacement as a GPS can presume sea level if it loses enough satellites to work in 3D.

Also on iDrive does anyone else have their iPod (mine is a gen 1 Touch 16GB) keep dropping off the system? Every hundred miles or so I have to unplug and replug it and then everything it just fine, including position in a play list which was playing when it stopped.

I really dislike being the whining Minnie on this forum so I'll end by saying that iDrive aside the car is magnificent. Is it just me or is there an actual engine/transmission remap after 1200 miles? I fancy my car was more lively the morning after I passed that threshold, but it may just have been sunshine, knowledge I could use the car more, and the vacation spirit.

If you have NAV you have the USB in the glove box, but it is hard to find. While sitting in the driver's seat, open the glove box. Then, put your head into the foot well of the passenger seat. (No, I'm not joking or being crude.) The USB slot is up high in the glove box. Once you find it and get the feel of it, it is not big deal to put the USB in. By the way, that is the same slot you can use to upload music files to your car if you do not have the 6FL option.

Put the USB in, start the car, an then wait a minute. I find that sometimes if I go to NAV too soon, the USB does not show up.

As far as trip with multiple destinations goes, that should be there. That is not just used for importing trips, but also for creating multiple destination trips from within the vehicle.

While I don't think you are joking or being crude, you *are* making some rather wild assumptions on my degree of flexibility! ;-)

I found the USB port in my glove box (upper right hand corner) and was able to download a route from my USB drive to the NAV system! w00t!

Thanks everyone for your help.

Part 2 of my query (you didn't know there was going to be a part two, did you?) is how do we get bmw-routes to beam the route to the car like you can with destinations and google maps?

It says you need a bmw-connect account, which I believe I have (I've asked my dealer to verify this) but when I try to log in, I can't. Nor does it offer any advice on what to do if you don't have an account. There is no "Sign Up" button or anything...